The present invention relates to disk drives and storage medium devices. In particular, the present invention relates to removal of random offsets in velocity controlled hard disk drive head/arm assemblies during head retraction.
Generally, a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) includes a magnetic read/write head and several magnetic disks, each disk having concentric data tracks for storing data. The disks are mounted on a spindle motor, which causes the disks to spin. The read/write head is typically mounted on a slider, which is mounted to a suspension or load beam. The load beam is attached to an actuator arm of an actuator, which moves the read/write head over the spinning disk during operation. As the disks spin, the slider suspended from the actuator arm “flies” a small distance above the disk surface. The slider carries a transducing head for reading from or writing to a data track on the disk.
In addition to the actuator arm, the slider suspension comprises a bearing about which the actuator arm pivots. A large scale actuator motor, such as a voice coil motor (VCM), is used to move the actuator arm (and the slider) over the surface of the disk. When actuated by the VCM, the actuator arm can be moved from an inner diameter to an outer diameter of the disk along an arc until the slider is positioned above a desired data track on the disk.
A control circuit is coupled to a coil in the VCM in order to controllably supply current to the coil. When a current is passed through the coil, a motive force is exerted on the actuator arm. The actuator arm is subjected to a force tending to accelerate the actuator arm at a rate defined by the magnitude of the current, and in a direction defined by the polarity of the current. Thus, in order to accelerate or decelerate the actuator arm until it is moving at a desired velocity and in a desired direction, it is important to know the actual direction and velocity of the actuator arm. It is known that the back electromotive force (back EMF) from the coil of the actuator is representative of the velocity and direction of movement of the actuator arm.
Parking zones in an HDD allow the read/write head to be safely landed after the hard drive has ceased operation. When an HDD is powered down, it usually performs certain operations before actually disconnecting from the external power source. One of these power down operations is to operate the actuator arm to move the head to the parking zone. If the head is not moved to the parking zone prior to power down, the head will land on the disk after the disk stops spinning, potentially damaging the disk and the read/write head.
Typically, the circuit that measures the velocity of retraction has random offsets that limit the ability of the circuit to accurately measure and control the speed of a retraction. This is especially true at low retraction speeds, where the offsets are more significant. Further, the offsets limit the reliability of stop detection methods due to random offsets in the velocity measurement. Thus, there is a need for an approach to eliminate random offsets that are found in circuits of velocity controlled HDD head/arm assemblies during retraction.